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12/28/2004 Archived Entry: "Author Susan Sontag dies at 71"

Posted by steve @ 01:34 PM EST [Link]

YOU WON'T BE MISSED: I can't wait for the inevitable hand-wringing that we've lost another intellectual giant because of the death of Susan Sontag today. Already she's being described as the leading intellectual of her generation so undoubtedly many boomers are crying in their low-fat lattes this afternoon. I for one will not weep for her.

After the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks Sontag, in a New Yorker essay refused to call the murderers 'cowards' because she defined "courage [as a] morally neutral virtue.". In a 2003 interview when asked what Susan Sontag's America was she answered, "My America is called Europe. It is my place of dreams." She once described the white race as a cancer on humanity, though oddly enough she didn't end her own life to ameliorate the illness. I won't even bother to address her hateful essay on the Abu Ghraib pictures in which she announced that the pictures represented America today.

I could sit here all day and quote the intellectual sickness that Sontag has personified since the 1960s but it's hardly worthwhile. She was the voice of another generation, bleating on about imperialism and the other concerns of graying 60s radicals who haven't changed their basic assumptions about the world in four decades.